The National Association of Community Legal Centers (NACLC) annual accounts in 2013 (above) – before the $5 Million Child Abuse Royal Commission funding started to flow – and the NACLC’s most recent accounts (below), after- and in anticipation of – the stream of the rivers of gold that were intended to help abused kids, but somehow got lost along the way.

Well you can see the accounts.

Let’s then ask some pertinent questions, and as a child sex abuse victim who cannot seem to access legal assistance, no matter how hard I try, I am entitled to goddamn ask them.

Why, when knowmore’s funding has tripled during the past 2 years, have their employee expenses multiplied nearly five times?

Given that the not-for-profit organisation spent nothing on travel in 2013 – or at best subsumed the costs into the conference budget, which was markedly less than it is today – are they now spending $655 266 a year on travel? For what?

Is spending $1 in every $7.53 allocated to assist child abuse victims on travel expenses justifiable, moral and ethical? And how does this excessive continental jaunting help damaged souls like me who can’t afford or access legal representation to attempt to right the wrongs that have been perpetrated against us?

What are knowmore’s travel policies? Who approves travel? Where do the frequent flyer points go? Who is it that is doing all the travelling?

Why is an organisation that spent no money whatsoever on consultants two years ago suddenly spending almost 11% of the funding it has been given to help child sex abuse victims on consultancies? Half a million bloody bucks. WTF?

Is the cash being splashed on pretty infographics and reports that do nothing to help victims but make the bosses at the publicly funded faux-legal service look and feel good? And who are these high-priced consultants anyway? And how did they win the tender for the job. What’s that Mum? There was no tender? Nah, surely not.

Given that the organisation’s funding only lasts for another 2 years, what the hell are they depreciating, and why the hell are they buying rather than leasing whatever the asset may be, given the short-term nature of their funding?

How on earth can an organisation with less than 50 staff members spend over 300 grand on recruitment in a single year? Something’s quite rotten there. Who is the recruitment firm, and who do they know? Worth having a close look at this one Mr Brandis, mark my words and don’t you worry about that.

In 2014 knowmore employed 40 staff. In 2015 they employed 41, although they claimed to employ 49. Taking the figure at its highest, how on God’s earth did the wage bill jump more than a million and half for just 9 extra employees? Which fat cat is copping the cream?

All these questions and a whole lot more demand answers.

Child sexual abuse victims are sitting out in limbo, unrepresented and alone, while the troughers who are supposed to be supporting them are living high on the hog at the public’s expense.

On the 20th of January – after attempting unsuccessfully for months to get my cancer-stricken and dying mum the refund of her school fees that the Anglican Archbishop Phillip Aspinall had so magnanimously publicly proclaimed his institution would pay to parents of abuse victims at St Paul’s, a promise that he promptly reneged on the moment that that the TV cameras were switched off – I telephoned knowmore, desperately seeking some urgent legal advice and assistance to find out what the hell I could do to spare Mum the final indignity of dying without the church acknowledging the terrible deeds that had been done to her first born and much-loved son.

At the time that I made the call to knowmore I was frantic. My wife was desperately ill, I was pushing against the tide trying to manage my own medical condition, my Dad was in hospital after a heart attack a few days before that almost did him in and was preparing to undergo a double bypass, and my cancer-weakened Mum was on the point of collapse.

In fact scarcely an hour after I made the call to knowmore, Mum did indeed collapse, and in a panic I had to dial triple O to summon an ambulance to race her to hospital, a task that mug punters like me try assiduously to avoid. She was in such bad shape that she remained there for a fortnight in a life-threatening condition, and didn’t come home until days after Dad was discharged.

At the time I made the call to knowmore – and still to this day – my single desire was for Mum to gain some cold comfort from an admission by her church that they had f*cked up, and an acknowledgement by way of refund of her hard-earned school fees that it wasn’t she or I who were to blame for my slide from scholarship student to slacker, but rather the fault of the school in which she had rested her hopes and dreams.

This was no joke. In fact it was damn near the most important thing in my life. Before Mum took her last breath upon this earth, and her ashes were interred alongside three generations of her ancestors in the columbarium of St Augustine’s church at Hamilton – just down the hill from the mansion where for more than a century Brisbane’s usually imported Archbishops lived in lavish luxury – she and I wanted an acknowledgement of the wrongs that had so surreptitiously been inflicted by ill- intentioned sadists with only sex on their mind.

All I was asking for was a simple gesture to help wash away the hurt and the pain inflicted on my family over the decades since my abuse, and an absolution of the blame that, lost and bewildered, I wrongly inflicted upon my parents for sending me to the the school that destroyed my innocence, and they unknowingly wrought upon me for smashing their hopes and dreams into a million pieces.

So in desperation and despair I telephoned knowmore, and my call was answered by someone that I presume was an admin officer, who put me through to a lawyer named Leanne Scoines, a lawyer employed at who knows what inflated salary by the then seemingly selfless organisation that could salve my despair, and become the answer to my long-ignored prayers.

Within minutes I had detailed the background of my abuse and associated matters to Ms Scoines, and told her all about my present personal predicament, and after baring my soul in this manner I pleaded for urgent assistance.

And the knowmore lawyer – who has no mandate for or interest in taking on cases for victims – told me that she had just the man I needed, a bloke named Steve Herd from a firm named Murphy Schmidt, and that she would have Mr Herd call me post-haste to arrange a meeting so he could get moving on the issue of my Mum’s fee refund, pronto.

January the 20th this was.

I waited and I waited, not wanting to stretch the envelope and appear to be a pain in the arse, but didn’t hear a bloody thing for a fortnight, so then I started chasing…and chasing ….and chasing….and heard nothing from Mr Herd, but instead only the sound of silence.

Finally I received a return phone call from Ms Scoines, and after complaining vociferously about the most unwelcome delay I received one not long after from Mr Herd himself, and an appointment was set for the 12th of March., more than 3 weeks after I requested urgent assistance and was assured that it would be delivered.

Five million dollars a year of taxpayers money and I had to wait nearly a month for help, and even then only after I had chased like f*ck and chased some more. As frustrating as that was though, it is not the main issue. In fact it isn’t even half the issue.

This is.

Murphy Schmidt, the firm that the supposedly trauma aware government funded mob had referred me to, was and is owned and run by two scions of the Catholic Church,, menage a deux who had both held senior positions witinh the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Brisbane at the exact same time that grotesque abuses were being perpetrated on children by monsters from the deep, crimes that were then covered up by the very institutions that the law firm partners sought to defend and protect.

Murphy.

Gerry Murphy.

This bloke.

A good mate of my mortal enemy the Branch Stacker’s dad.

Schmidt.

Tricia Schmidt.

Patricia Schmidt, nee Wagner, sister of the brothers of Grantham quarry fame. The blokes who had slagged my much loved mate John Tyson – a man who lost his wife and youngest child in the 2011 floods – all over town.

This pair of proprietors were and remain representatives of the church that wrought absolute havoc upon the lives of young men and women entrusted into their care.And the legal service that purports to protect child abuse victims sent me straight into the spider’s tangled and wicked web.

I don’t need to go into the detail of the Catholic Church’s abuse, for each of us know it all too well, and we all have seen and read of the sneering denials of the Cardinal Sinner George Pell, the craven coward who hides behind the Vatican walls and refuses to return to the sunburnt land of his birth, for the rightful fear that he will be cast into chains and flung like a bandit behind bars, a fate most deserving for a monster like he.

Both Murphy and Schmidt are associates and/or friends of Pell.

Murphy sat on the Catholic Finance Committee throughout the ‘Toward Healing’ era, when Pell and his supporters battered child sex abuse victims into sullen submission, and forced them to accept mere pittances for the pain they had endured after Pell made it perfectly clear that he would fight them to the death in courts across the land should, like Oliver Twist, they dare to ask for more.

Schmidt was a member of the Catholic Education Council at the time the church afforded a convicted pedophile a hidden room with a view across to the pool where semi-naked teenage schoolboys backstrokied at the Marist run college next door.

The bastard McKeirnan who was sitting on his balcony wanking as watched the smooth shaved swimmers slide through the water was a fiend who abused two of my mates who once served as altar boys at his Sunday mass. The libacious lecherous freak ruined their f*cking lives.

And here I was being sent by the by the outfit funded by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse into the arms of the friends of these abusers, referred for representation to a firm whose founding partners and ongoing owners were complicit in concealing the crimes of these pedophiles and more.

It was a Faustian nightmare.

Yet I was but a poor, sick, desperate victim whose mother was dying, and I had only discovered these dread-inducing facts minutes before, as I was on the all stops train from Geebung to the City on my way to meet with lawyers from the fug-bound firm to which I had by knowmore been referred, with no alternative option, and my single-mother of three sister had taken an unpaid day off work in order to allow me to attend the meet,

What the hell was I supposed to do?

Nothing. I had been afforded no other choice,

And so I walked into Murphy Schmidt’s lavishy renovated three story heritage building in Mary Street, replete with expensive marble statues, and on the plush leather couches I sat nervously waiting for the better part of twenty minutes before the maestro Steve Herd appeared, and directed me to an equally luxurious meeting room down a flight of expansive stairs.

Most sportsfans who read this site know the story of my abuse.

In early October last year I wrote a piece that was published on this site, in which I disclosed the horrific abuse that I had suffered at the hands of a man named Gregory Stephen Masters, who at the time I told my sordidly true tale was employed at Brisbane Boys Grammar School as Master in charge of boys of the same age I was when he drugged, drunked and defiled me.

Masters became aware of my disclosures two days after I published them, and 12 hours later hung himself from his Spring Hill balcony in preference to enduring the ignominy of a trial, conviction and inevitable jailing for his deeply perverted crimes.

Steve Herd from Murphy Schmidt certainly knew the events that had unfolded, even if he hadn’t read about it in the newspapers or seen it on the TV – and it was splashed all over both – because I had told Leanne Scoines from knowmore everything that had happened, and with my permission she had forwarded the whole box and dice onto Herd.

In trepidation tinged with desperation I descended the marble stairs of the unnecessarily swish law firm office with Mr Herd, and when we reached the meeting room that was once a dank basement cellar the preferred knowmore panel member introduced me to a young lawyer whose name I shall withhold, for what transpired next was not the young fella’s fault. Like the prison guards at Auschwitz he was only doing his job, blindingly – to give him the benefit of a somewhat huge doubt – simply doing the bidding of his bullish boss.

‘Hi Archie’ said Steve Herd. ‘This is xxxxx’ .

“Xxxxx went to Grammar, and was a student of Greg Masters. I hope you don’t mind’.

What the f*ck could I say or do?

Burst into tears, lie down on the floor and sob convulsively as I wanted to? Or smile falsely and say hey Steve, you’ve brought a bloke who spent 5 years with my abuser to our meeting, gee mate that’s just fine and dandy and let’s get it on?

Like every child sex abuse victim I’ve been pretending for years. So I smiled and said ‘Sure Steve, it’s ok, there’s nothing I’d like better than baring my soul to a bloke taught by mu tormentor’, and proceeded to cover up my distress with laughter and feigned jollity, whilst inside I was dying a thousand deaths.

After conferencing with the pair of lawyers for 2 hours, during which I was promised the world – promises that would of course never be delivered, as oaths of fealty to the abused never are – I walked out of the door of Murphy Schmidt and stepped on to the Mary Street sidewalk, turned left and began to walk toward Central Station, but by the time I had reached the corner of Edward Street I found myself paralytic with grief, drenched and drowning in tears.

Ordinary folk blissfully ignorant of the cause of my despair, merely waiting for the street lights to change, began to stare, and embarrassed and ashamed I suddenly sprinted headlong across the road, ignoring the red lights and the oncoming traffic and the risk that I may be run over and die. I simply didn’t care. I just ran and ran, for what seemed like miles, unable to breath, but it was in reality only seconds, and soon I found myself lying on the lush grass of the grounds of St Stephen’s Cathedral, where I turned my face to the turf and sobbed convulsively until I simply couldn’t sob any more. And then I sobbed some more, so hard that I thought my tears could never stop.

My phone rang, again and again, but I had neither the strength nor the will to answer it despite knowing that it was my beloved wife calling, and knowing that she and my daughters would be frantic with worry and and fear and care. I was too far gone, lost and alone and in the world of pain that only those whose lives have been stolen away from them as children can ever truly know, and so I ignored the incessant ringing of the phone, pretending that it was simply the echo of a peaceful paradise that I could never know.

It grew dark, and it became cold, and periodically people – Good Samaritans one and all – passed by, and stopped and asked me if I was okay.

‘Yeah’ I told them, ‘I’ve just had too much to drink’.

I hadn’t downed a drop.

Sometime during the cold dark darkness I felt a warm hand on my shoulder, and heard a voice that had filled my heart with joy and saved my sanity so many times before. I don’t know what the time was, and I don’t know how she found me, and have never asked, but it was my soul mate, the woman who because I hate myself I have tried to push away for 20 years, the only adult who has ever truly loved me, without codicil or condition.

She stretched out her hand and whispered softly ‘stand up, come home’.

Warm in her arms, I did.

And thus here I am.

This is my small story, and now perhaps you knowmore about the unbearable sadness that afflicts a once young sexual abuse victim’s senses and invades their soul.

I want to tell you a little story about an outfit called knowmore, a government-funded national legal service established as a program of the National Association of Legal Community Services in 2013 to provide free legal advice and assistance, information and referral services to people engaging, or considering engaging, with the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

Long tale short, this shambles is a rort.

A $5 million dollar a year government-funded hotbed of nepotism and cronyism that does 2/3rd’s of Sweet Fanny Adams to provide legal advice and assistance to child sexual abuse victims, but puts in a 110% effort to line the pockets of their law firm mates, while at the same time doing as little work themselves as possible other than queuing up at airport departure gates to fly around the country to attend totally unnecessary meetings and meaningless conferences.

Junkets is the word that most people call the. Taxpayer-funded junkets.

Things like flying a bunch of millionaire law firm partners and their associates – plus every single staff member of knowmore – from around Australia on an all-expenses paid trip to attend a two and a half hour information session as part of a 2-day ‘training event’ in Sydney.

The net result of this expensive exercise?

The lawyers set up a group email to share topical information.

I kid you not.

It is the clowns that run knowmore must be kidding.

The whole thing’s absurd, an absolute joke, and if child abuse victims knew how this mob were spending the millions of dollars that are supposed to be helping us navigate the minefield of the law and gain some semblance of justice for the damage and pain we have suffered in the decades since there would be chaos in the streets as we all flocked to tear this edifice to excess down.

In the following articles I am going to spell out and illustrate the reasons that I make such trenchant criticisms of the service established to help people like me, but before I do I would like to begin with a small personal anecdote to set the scene, for I believe that my own little tale is a microcosm of the massive scale of issues besetting the knowmore organisation, and illustrative of the massive – and in my opinion quite possibly fraudulent – misdirection of precious and vital public funds by an institution that is supposed to be on child sex abuse victim’s side, but instead is simply raping us all over again.

As the ancient Roman poet Juvenal famously asked:

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

When our protectors betray us, then who will guard us from the guards?

The properties below are those that the mandarins of knowmore have elected to splash the millions intended to assist child abuse victims on instead of renting humble digs and spending the money where it is most needed – on helping damaged and often ill victims to access legal services to guide them through the labyrinth and finally achieve some modicum of justice for the evils perpetrated against them as innocent children.

Evils that have sent down the paths of self-hatred and abuse, into the spiral of drug and alcohol and gambling addictions. Horrors that cause people like me not to sleep at night, and have cost many of us our families, our wives, the joy of properly engaging with our children, and in a number of cases our lives.

I know of child sex abuse victims who right now, as the untouched world sleeps, are huddled in parks and streets and alleyways, trying to stay safe and to keep warm.

I know of many victims lying this morning in dirty sheets in bedraggled, run down boarding houses, moaning in the daily alcoholic torpor that keeps the demons ever so slightly at bay.

I know of even more tossing and turning in the torture they call sleep, dreaming of the loves they have lost by pushing them away in pain; of their fractured families who cannot understand their torment because it hurts too much to tell how it really feels; of the children they yearn to reach out and touch and hold but can’t, because the devils that reached out and touched and held them have ravaged their minds and their hearts and their souls.

They lie those that tell us, for reasons of their own

That the pain of abuse is a mere stranger

And that victim’s misery can ever be known.

For where the hurt-filled damaged hearts

And five million dollars meet

There is only desolation, ignorance and deceit

Below are the offices of knowmore.

The organisation funded to help floating ghosts of human beings like me has spent almost half a million dollars – or 10% of the funding that the people of Australia have given them to help heal us – to lease these edifices to waste and decay.

I was born sick,But I love itCommand me to be wellAmen. Amen. Amen. Amen.

Take me to churchI’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your liesI’ll tell you my sins and you can sharpen your knifeOffer me that deathless deathGood God, let me give you my life

Isn’t it funny how sometimes odd little coincidences occur in life?

Take this one for example – the Uncle, Cousins and Brother of the arch=pedophile Clarence Henry Howard Osborne – aka Clarrie Osborne – all lived withing a short walk or a decent stone’s throw from the Anglican Church Grammar School in East Brisbane, then known as the Church of England Grammar School, but best known as Churchie.

Gee that’s interesting Archie, I hear you say, but Brisbane’s a small town and sh*t happens and what does it all mean?

Plenty is the answer, especially in a town of well over a million that ain’t that small at all, but hold your breath and I’ll tell you why in a few minutes.

Frederick William – ‘Freddie’ – Whitehouse was born of a well-to-do family of upwardly mobile sycophants from the sh*thole of Ipswich, later the birthplace and childhood stomping ground of Kevin ‘Cumquat’ Walters, the poor excuse for a footy coach who is about to gift Loz ‘the Schnozz’ Daley the King’s State of Origin crown.

Young Freddie’s grandad was once a simple baker, a maker of meat pies, but he put his mind to making money and quickly worked out then when you live in the arse-end of nowhere the most efficient way of doing it is to kiss the butts of those with the bucks.

And so Mr F Whitehouse Snr did, initially establishing a fine dining parlor at which he could entertain the big wigs who came to rape the flood-prone town and steal its valuable coal in between storms, and later branching out and playing the gourmet ponce to a posse of precious posers with deep purses and royalist leanings.

Old man Whitehouse’s big gig was laying on a feed for a thousand posh d*ckheads who wished for reasons unknown to celebrate a visit by Princes George and Albert, a couple of toffs taking the 19th century version of what we now know as Schoolies week by travelling the oceans on an early version of The World so that toadies in the colonies could cursty and kiss their royal rings.

Of course not one of the naff noshers came from Geebung, because we on this side of Downfall Creek were staunch republicans and thus wouldn’t attend such a w*nkfest except to knock off the piss, and there were too many coppers and judges and all-round laggers of the like to try that type of lark, so on the night our old ancestors went round to the rich ‘Long Reign the Kingers!’ and emptied out their mansions instead.

Happy days they were for weeks afterwards, until the cash from the fenced loot at Penfolds Jeweller’s got knocked off on good things at odds on running around at Eagle Farm, and the flash gear bought with the stolen loot went into the local pawnbroker’s pocket, but hey you can’t complain about salad days when you know a lettuce wilts in a week can you?

And anyway young George turned out to be a clown who allowed his Ruskie Romanov cousins to be knocked off by the Commies, and his son ended up a Nazi loving, Yankee home-wrecking retard who was the 1930’s equivalent of Pope Benedict, so the Bunger boys proved a bit smarter than the tosser ‘God Save the King’ toasters after all, which simply goes to prove that the more things change the more they stay the same.

Anyway, after the right royal pain in the arse visit Freddie’s old man took over the joint and promptly plonked on a champion chomp for the Governor and his aide-de-camp, which is kind of funny because the ching-ching he earned from such endeavours afforded Father Freddie to send little Fred to Ipswich Grammar to be educated in the fine art of becoming an arse-de-camp.

It also allowed old Fred the funds to afford the legal fees and the bribes to get his by now weirdo son out of the shit when he himself tool a gap year trip on a boat, in this case to Tassie, where young Fredo promptly five-fingered a garbage bag full of grog from a merchant cutter whilst four-sails to the wind, and then pretended to be a gassed ex-Gallipoli vet to get the sympathy of the presiding Police Magistrate and avoid an unfortunate spell in the stone-lined cells.

Fortuitously for Freddie palms had been greased, and the police prosecutor ran dead and the complainant – who the day before had wanted Freddie hung, drawn and quartered – decided that a deuce or two in his pocket elicited all sorts of empathy, so he asked the beak for spare the young bloke the brush, a request with which the clearly kick-backed cape wearer was more than somewhat pleased to abide, and nobody thought to check the veracity of young Fred’s claim to have been a gassed up victim of the Huns, and thank goodness and a grand in used notes for that hey?

Anyway, Freddie came back to Queensland, failed to get sober and thus got kicked out of home, and was sent to the University of Queensland to learn about spiders and rocks and naturalism and all that sort of thing, and while he was there hooked up with another rich weirdo named James Mayne, an old bloke with more dough and devils drink than you could poke a stick at, and a devious desire to down the drink and poke the stick at a young fellow named Fred.

It was an absolute marriage made in heaven, and strange things happened thereafter, for if you believe the crooked record books Freddie gained his Bachelor’s degree in rocks in 1922 at the age of 22, copped a Masters degree 2 years later, and then somehow miraculously made the journey to Oxford University and back – 35 to 40 days each way, or about 3 months return – in 1925 with enough time left over to gain a PhD (usual course length 4 years) and still be at the office in time to be appointed the official Queensland Government Geologist, despite the fact that he hadn’t a single days work experience at anything other than blowing rich blokes, pilfering piss, and getting sh*t-faced, and that his degree was in crabs, pearls and prawns rather than subterranean strata.

Reality doesn’t matter when you’re rich and well-connected to a rooter though, and Freddie’s career took off from that moment on, so much so that when World War Two kicked off and conscription for all unmarried blokes between the ages of 35 and 45 kicked in, the bachelor’s butch benefactor secured him a sinecure at St Lucia army HQ and a captain’s commission to boot, just so that Fredo wouldn’t be too far away when his Mayne man decided he needed a nookie or a warm hug.

And then, in one of those sweet moments of serendipity like the single shot that started the war, Freddie met Clarrie, and the Queensland pedophile network became both consummated and complete.

Osborne – an anal type of pederast who weirdly preferred penises to bums – became Whitehouse’s very own aide-de-camp, dick-size detailer, and distributor of indecent material, and thus for the 35 years post-his discharge was free to pursue his perverted pleasures, absolutely untroubled by the threat of arrest, until in 1979 he pushed the pedo envelope just a little too far and, in the words of Brisbane’s pre-eminent crime historian and writer Matthew Condon, it All Fell Down.

And now, forty years later, through a broad collaboration of bright people who care, the true tale of devils, demons and deviates is finally about to be told.

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